Having observed the writing class and EFL students" essays in previous semester, the researchers found that their essay were in poor quality. This situation portrays the fact that writing is a complex skill to learn in English language acquisition. This study is aimed to investigate the difficulties faced by EFL students in essay writing as well as exploring their learning needs to have better quality of English composition. Examining essays and administering open-ended questionnaires were done to 33 students of English Department at Widya Gama Mahakam University, Indonesia, to find students" difficulties in broad-spectrum. In addition, semi-structured interview to the writing lecturer was also conducted to dig his perception related to challenging matters about teaching essay writing. The findings showed that students have major difficulties in grammatical, cohesion and coherence terms. Moreover, minor aspects also had been revealed regarding to students" writing, namely paragraph organization, dictions, and vocabulary misspelling. Considering its complexity in accomplishing essay writing task, the students expected more intense guidance from the lecturer, such as continuous consultation regarding to the lecturer"s feedback in their essay draft. The interview result confirmed this issue. The lecturer admitted that limited time and big number of students in one class became his great barriers to improve the quality of the students" essay. These facts drive new challenges for the writing lecturer in two ways; 1) the lecturer should guide students properly by using step-by-step procedures so that the students feel comfortable in writing the essay, and 2) explicit explanation related to the revision given is needed. It is important to note that this issue demands a new and effective teaching essay writing strategy to achieve fruitful outcomes of teaching and learning process especially in essay writing context.

<p class="abstrak">This study aimed on revealing students’ preference on types of corrective feedback given by their English teacher as well as their reason. The study was conducted in a vocational school in Samarinda. Data collection was done by means of observation, interview and questionnaire. The observation was done for three meetings each in two different level of English proficiency classes (high and low) and ten students from the observed classes were interviewed. Moreover, the questionnaires were administered to 196 out of 385 students from all classes of twelfth grade. Furthermore, the result of this study revealed that the students preferred to have Explicit, Meta-Linguistic Clue and Elicitation corrective feedback. However, there was mismatch between students’ preference on the expected type corrective feedback (Explicit) and the teacher’s corrective feedback (Recast). The students’ preference on explicit corrective feedback was based on the reason that it provided answer and explanation on the correct version of the corrected oral production. The students’ preference on Meta-linguistic Clue and Elicitation corrective feedback were because these feedbacks activated their knowledge and generated students’ thinking to discover the correct version.</p>

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This study focuses on correlation between reading comprehension and writing ability in descriptive text. The researchers collect the data through two instruments, i.e. test of reading comprehension and descriptive text writing. This research is researched quantitatively and SPSS was used to analyse the data.  Then, the result of the study shows that mean score of reading comprehension is 72.47. It means that the students reading comprehension was good. Meanwhile, the mean score of writing ability in descriptive text is 61.14. In addition, the researchers found that r-counted is 0.098, and the r-table with n = 108 (df-2 = 106) with significance level = 95% (α = 0.05) is 0.189. It indicates low correlation between the two variables.

Classroom management is an important concern for every teacher in making effective setting classroom in schools holds students together and offers them opportunity to achieving their goals in learning process especially in large classes with to much numbers of students. This research applied qualitative research. The subject of this research were the teacher’s and students of SMP NEGERI 01 Tanjung Selor. The researcher conducted interview to collect the data. The researcher did some steps to analyze the data, namely; data condensation, data display, and conclusion drawing.The result of this research showed that teachers mostly organize students into group during lesson, walk around classroom to check students work, set particular seating arrangement, address misbehavior and using variety of teaching method such as discussion, group work and group project to make students active during class. In addition, students’ perception has significant relationship between teachers’ strategies and student’s performance in learning English. The finding also showed that teachers has positive strategies in managing their class and the students enjoyed the method used by teachers during English lesson.